The Serialas and Parallelos.
by Jaap van Till, HAN University of Applied Sciences, NL, March 3, 2009
No, these tribes are not rival gangs in the Sopranos series. They are the representatives of two generations who now live and work differently in many ways.
For instance, when I lecture you can hear the soft rattle of many student fingers on their laptop keyboards. Some of my colleague lecturers forbid open laptops but I allow it. I know that the young can do many tasks in parallel and at the same time. Listening to me and looking at my slides is only one of them.
My parents were baffled that I could do my homework better with the radio on in my room. My generation is baffled by our grandchildren that can play games, talk on their cellphone, watch Youtube movies, do MSN on their laptop, twitter and do their homework from books (!) at the same time. They multitask online and girls are even better than boys at this, and always where anyway at dividing their attention 
But some report that young people get very tired from this and sometimes start to behave socially rather strangely. And this goes on all day!! 96 % of Japanese 16 and 17 year old schoolkids have smartphones with Internet access, on which they email frequently (20 – >100/day), read e-books, game, listen to music, surf on the web and chat – and most of this simultaneously!
Sociologists and marketing gnomes distinguish three subsequent generations alive now, well, sort of:
- (I) The TV Generation. Middle-class mass media centred, represented by Joe Sixpack and the Couch Potatoes, watching everything that moves on the boobtube including silly commercials (originally inserted every 6-7 minutes to change Ampex videotapes on the broadcasting machines).
(II) The Nintendo Generation. Also called Generation Nix or the (car) Backseat Generation. They control a lot of single button things with their thumbs. Test: look with which finger they press the elevator button. Above 25 now. The hardworking Joe the Plumber with his cellphone is probably a representative.
(III) The Net Generation (13-25 years old). They are the Digital Natives born and raised wired and, yes, they are hyper-connected. If I have my way Josie HyperRoom [1] will be the representative of this upcoming lifestyle.
Now my point is that the TV Generation has grown up with attention and focus on one thing in one place, like a book or a newspaper or a TV set or a filmscreen or an orchestra or a car frontwindow, all of which are Serial in physical place (on the newspaper page) and thus are watched and listened to Sequentially in time.
The NetGen young find this uncool and boring. The young creative class want all channels of all their senses communicating in every direction at the highest possible network speed.
Students in Holland have 100/100Mb/s connections via SURFnet in their dormitory room, and complain that ‘this sooo slow that it sucks’. Primary school boards ask for GbEth Internet access lines right now from rather baffled TV Generation city councillors who think that triple play ‘broadband’ is the way to go!!
And forget about MByte quota on Fiber-to-the-Home. Kids will flood those in minutes. Why hold them back??
As explained above, the NetGen can communicate, collaborate and browse on several physical gadgets/windows in parallel and do this simultaneously.
So the mindset of the Serialas (I) is serial and sequential, and of the Parallelos (III) is parallel and simultaneous. For those interested in science, these mindsets are dual to eachother. A bit like from different planets.
Don’t think this is a minority of asocial P2P downloaders (most telco planners – yes, TV gen – think that). I am talking of a whole generation which is now entering jobs and offices around you. And old farts like me had better not stand in their way or they will be digitally dis-intermediated.
Newspaper managers, book publishers, TV makers, even comic book publishers have noticed a recent lack of interest in their serial media. All around the world they are worried and try everything in the way of sex and violence to attract the young.
In vain, I am afraid.
More attention-grabbing memes and shorter publications are not the point. Parallel channels into the mind are. You can see that in the way successful films and TV series (sic!) have now multiple parallel and unrelated stories woven into the script. And children can zap around 30 TV channels on a set to ‘see’ many films in parallel. I can’t.
To dig a bit deeper, under the hood of our computers and through networks a similar shift from serial to parallel has been going on.
When I want to look at a webpage on my iPhone with the cellphone wireless link (GSM) I can see parts of the page slowly appear one after the other on the screen.
When I open the 3G link and do the same the components are brought from different Internet sources in parallel nearly at the same time.
With a WiFi connection in my home to the DSL modem the whole page (all pieces fetched in parallel) appears real fast. Did you ever wonder why humans can think so fast compared to the slow chemical processes in nerve synapses: billions of parallel nerve paths through the brain, like light rays through a lens! So we ourselves are wired for parallelism.
So the computer-computer applications linking many applets parallel in clouds work real fast and at top speeds of computers. Computers, together with their young users, drive demand for bandwidth! So this is what drives the upward curves for network capabilities of Edholms Law for wireless, nomadic and fixed connection devices.
It is hard for the ageing TV generation serialas to imagine this, but this is what will drive the FttX rollout, now shown to be possible to do profitably, even including rural areas, in the Netherlands. Not so much a boring ‘new media service’ or a long-sought killer app, but a new breed of creative class users, empowered by their cool computer networks.
Network Power to the Parallelos!![1]http://www.budde.com.au/News_and_Views/2009/January/Dad,_I_want_a_HyperRoom.aspx
March 4th, 2009 at 9:32 am
Let me offer another two groups — the Fleshettes and the Digerati. Here again, not rival gangs, but a distinction between “mediated” and “unmediated” delivery of sound and motion.
Consider how little sound is unmediated these days. Even classical orchestra halls have microphones and speakers, let alone musical instruments that do not make any sound without electronics.
And visual stuff is becoming more mediated all the time, so that even “live” concerts have giant screens to expand the audience that can view the performers.
I understand that some sports organizations have found that people might prefer a venue with large screens next to the actual playing field over the “nosebleed”(incredibly distant) seats at the actual playing field. Since “being in the crowd” was the same, they preferred a good mediated view to a bad unmediated one.
Of course, once the sound or visual is mediated, the connection in space or time can be arbitrarily distant. Certain events have “novelty” value, so if they are delayed, we might want to make sure no one tells us the ending in advance, but subject to that caveat, we might prefer to watch one game 3 hours late if it meant being able to watch two games that would otherwise conflict.
Note that it is possible to separate “group” activity versus “alone” activity from “mediated” versus “unmediated.” Although “distance education” usually means doing something home alone, it need not — students could still gather to meet and greet each other, even though they then watched a video lecture rather than a “live” one. Think movies and plays — both are experienced in a group, but the first is completely mediated and the second is probably not (although more and more).
With some very prestigious universities now releasing videos of their lectures, we are about to have some interesting choices. Will students, and those paying for the education, prefer famous person via video or local person “live.”? Will both groups prefer gathering in groups to being alone for the video?
Could The Rolling Stones or The Jonas Brothers (or whomever) do a “concert tour” by having a video released in large venues, and would it make a difference if the video were pre-recorded or “live”?
I ran two monthly statewide videoconferences for several years. We found that the audience preferred to be at the same site as the speaker for three major reasons (a) sound and sight was better; (b) opportunity to interact was better; and (c) they guessed that others felt the same way, so crowd was larger. But when we addressed (a) and (b), (c) was not such a problem. So if you knew the speaker would not come early nor stay late, and your chance of having your question presented and answered was the same, people would accept the speaker being remote. We did this with a speaker from Shanghai and one from DC.
So I wonder when we will see a “MIT-remote” or a “Berkeley-remote” as a viable alternative to “Local U”? And if so, will it be to individuals sitting alone or in groups? The same thing can apply (perhaps without the group question) to Dr-remote, music-instructor-remote, appliance-repair-remote, et al.
I happen to think the growing preponderance of Digeratis over Fleshettes will be a more profound change than Parallelos over Serialas.
Rollie
March 4th, 2009 at 9:34 am
If micro economists had been the midwives at the birth of capitalism, we all still be serfs living on feudal manors because they do not understand the nature of public goods and externalities. Rural electrification, achieved largely trough non-profit cooperatives (which serve about 73% of the land mass of the U.S., but 10% of the population) was one of the single greatest socioeconomic accomplishments of the 21st century. It produced massive benefits for urban dwellers (cheap food) and industry (a continuous source of labor). Teh micro economists just can’t deal with this type of public economics. The delivery of basic broadband connectivity to the unserved in rural America and the udnerserved in urban America, will have a similar effect on the 21st century economy. The really big payoff will be if a focused effort on serving the unserved in the U.S. creates models for affordable basic connectivity that are exportable — 2 billion households globally.